Monkey Punch

Katou Kazuhiko was born in Kiritappu Village, Hokkaido in 1937. He was the first son of his father Kazue and mother Umeko. Soon after he was born, they moved to Monbetsu where his father began to work at Unomai mine. They moved again so his father could work in Ehime Prefecture at the Besshi copper mine. When he was four or five, they moved back to Kiritappu where his father worked as a school janitor than as a kelp gatherer. Katou would help his father gather kelp and became a strong boat rower.

His mother bore two more sons, Teruhiko and Michiyoshi, and a daughter, Sekiko. Their father was a painter and often showed the children cartoons via a projector he bought at the end of World War II. Katou's father would scold him for buying candy but not for buying manga. When Katou graduated from junior high school, he put down "cartoonist" in a form asking him what he wanted to be; he completely ignored his teacher's advice to become a teacher in Kiritappu.

Katou would regularly contribute drawings to various newspapers and once received 500¥ from the Hokkaido Shimbun. In the spring of 1953, he entered Kiritappu High School and took a job as a X-ray engineer at the Hamanaka branch of Kushiro Red Cross Hospital. There, he met the hospital director Shunichi Michishita; Katou credits him with being the first person to recognize that he had a talent for drawing manga. Without him, "Monkey Punch" may have never existed.

^* above was taken from an article © 24 Apr 2001 Hokkaido Shimbun

In 1965, his first published story appeared in Playboy. In 1967, Katou Kazuhiko, under the pen name "Monkey Punch", began two manga series in Manga Action Weekly. The first series was called Pinky Punky and revolved around a sex-kitten private investigator of the same name. She was routinely hired to solve a murder and eventually winds up facing her arch-nemesis, a perverted mad scientist. The second series has become a staple in Japan and continues to be successful to this day; this series is Lupin III. Katou Kazuhiko originally intended to use the pen name "Monkey Punch" for only a year as he was not too fond of it. The opportunity to revert back to his original name never presented itself, and the pen name has stuck with him since.

After the success of Lupin III, Monkey Punch went on to direct some of his own anime features including Scoopers. Scoopers was set in a future where there is one company of investigative reporters for hire. The heroine is a beautiful reporter on the trail of a hot scoop along with her lecherous and very powerful android cameraman. Monkey Punch is still alive and active in Tokyo; he has directed some of the more recent Lupin movies as well as maintaining his own web site. He is also an active member of J-Mac, the Japanese Macintosh Artist Club.